Champions Way: Football, Florida, and the Lost Soul of College Sports

New York Times investigative reporter McIntire painstakingly lays out a damning case that Florida State University and its sports program abet sexual assaults and academic fraud as the price for producing championship football teams. McIntire introduces relevant individuals (such as FSU president Eric Barron, who would later become president of Penn State) and story lines early in the book as he carefully lays a foundation for his argument. He effectively weaves together emails, police reports, court transcripts, and interviews with whistle-blowers and victims to show a pattern in how Seminole stakeholders handled scandals. The rape allegation against star quarterback Jameis Winston in 2013 is the most-well-known episode in the book (Winston was cleared the next year), but McIntire delves deeper into that and many other events to show negligence by campus and local police, grade manipulation and deceit by FSU administrators, and shadowy mess cleaning by attorneys and boosters in order to keep star players on the field. McIntire summarizes the history of college sports and the social and economic culture of football in American universities, particularly in the South, convincingly arguing that these transgressions are widespread. [em](Sept.) [/em]